The Gods Need to Entertain Themselves Somehow
by Droston
Summary: Certainly Sanzo didn't just show up in a river one day. Certainly that must trouble him a little. Also, Hakkai teaches Hakuryuu a trick, Sanzo and Gojyo play good cop bad cop with a hillbilly, and the gods have a malformed sense of humor.


A Brief Note: I kid, I kid. I know they're all off on a trip through China in Some Mythical Time Period. So any appearances of non-China in Some Mythical Time Period things/people/religions are a.) for the purpose of being silly and anachronistically funny or b.) because I firmly believe that Jagermeister is the one and only liquor of champions (and the truly depressed).

Minekura's somewhat fuzzy on the limits of Cool Anachronistic Stuff but so far hasn't included Mythical Chinese Ladies saying "tarnation".

My point is, this is all in fun. Every last bit of it.

----

When Gojyo woke up, it was because a bright light slipped through his eyelids. He opened them with some effort, and his gaze landed on an open window. The light hurt his eyes. He wanted it gone. After some consideration he groaned, "Hakkai, turn out the sun."

He must have drifted back off after that gem, because when he woke up for real, the sun was considerably brighter. He tottered over to the window and shut the damn thing himself. To Hakkai, who was teaching Hakuryuu to roll over, he said: "I need a drink," and Hakkai's face darkened. Hakuryuu bleated.

Gojyo was confused. His brain was also apparently steel wool, so it wasn't surprising. "What's up?" he asked.

Hakkai sighed. "All of our food, it appears, has been stolen."

"Well, shit," said Gojyo. His steel wool brain offered that their stash of groceries had consisted of two packs of cigarettes and instant noodles. It wasn't the end of the world. "Well we can get room service. We can get room service _beer_. We can get room service beer _now_."

"The credit card, too."

Hakuryuu made a plaintive noise and cleaved to Hakkai's shoulder.

"Fuck," said Gojyo, "Where's Sanzo and Goku?"

"They went off to investigate. They should be back soon. My, I hope Goku hasn't sold his diadem for buns, as he threatened."

----

About an hour later, when Hakuryuu could roll over twice on command, Goku burst through the door. Sanzo was close behind, his face expressionless save the standard disdain.

"We think we found out who did it!" Goku carolled. Goku had a genuine investment in getting the card back because he quite literally couldn't eat without it.

"Did you get it back?" Gojyo asked.

Sanzo shook his head and sat down on the bed. His hand twitched impulsively to his sleeve, which was empty of cigarettes. "The people we spoke to said they live outside the town, near the river. Goku wants us to drive there this afternoon. I don't care."

"Shove the attitude, Sanzo. you want a cigarette as much as I do. Let's go get the thieving bastards. And kill them in a gruesome nicotine fit."

Hakkai smiled pacifyingly. "Sanzo, Goku, look what I taught Hakuryuu to do. Hakuryuu, roll over."

----

In ten minutes they were driving down the river. They pulled up in a cloud of dust in front of the door of a graying wooden shack. There was a hole in the roof, which was patched hastily by a fraying quilt. A skinny donkey was tied to the sagging porch. Hakkai skirted the range of its teeth as he went to knock on the door. It swung open with the force of his first knock, and a woman with her blonde hair in scrappy braids slunk up. She was missing one of her front teeth.

"Who're you," she demanded, fixing Hakkai with a glare.

Ignoring the question, Hakkai smiled beatifically. "I believe you have something of ours, ma'am," he said.

She tried to shut the door on him and he blocked it, still smiling, with an alarmingly powerful grip on her wrist. She looked up at him and said, in a grating voice, "you sayin' I _stole_ from you?"

"Well. Not from me, per se," Hakkai stepped to the side for Sanzo to back her against the wall with his gun.

"Stealing from a holy man," Sanzo ground out, "will earn you a special place in hell."

"Golly," she said blithely, "Mister, I may believe in that place but you sure's heck don't. Or are you some kinda new-fangled Buddhist?"

Sanzo cocked the gun. "Let me clarify: by 'a special place in hell' I mean that this bullet I am prepared to put in your brain will hurt _more than a regular one_."

"Gee. If you want it so bad, your cigarettes and instant noodles are on the table back there."

Goku darted after the bag.

"Good. Now where is the card?"

She shrugged. "I sure's heck don't know."

----

Seconds later, Hakkai was making Goku instant noodles in the woman's kitchen, and Sanzo and Gojyo were talking to the woman in her bedroom, behind the closed door. She sat on the dirty patchwork quilt. Sanzo sat on a wobbly stool, and Gojyo behind him on the bureau.

"What's your name, Miss?" Gojyo asked. He was lighting a cigarette.

"Jenny Sue."

"Jenny Sue, you don't mind if I smoke, do you?" Gojyo asked, Sanzo was already taking a long, grateful drag of his cigarette.

Jenny Sue shook her head. "Don't mind. My momma used to smoke all the time. 'Course, she lit up on the stove."

Gojyo smiled. "Listen, Jenny Sue, I know you probably need money. But so do we. And, you see, that card's the only money we've got. So how about we buy you a nice new dress—or, you know, your first dress, you can get out of those overalls—and some soup, and you give us the card? Easy, over, done."

Jenny Sue shook her head stubbornly. "My momma, she said I was never to give back anything I earned."

Gojyo nodded, the picture of understanding. "And you shouldn't. But you took this card, Jenny."

"You shut up."

"How did your momma die?" Gojyo asked.

"Oh, she's still kickin'. She just ain't right since she lost her baby all those years ago, so's I keep 'er locked up tight in the attic," as if to validate her statement, there was a crash and a curse through the thin boards above their heads, "'course, it ain't right to say she lost it. Makes it sound like she didn't have it—which she did—the man just made her send it off down the river. Which she did, real nice-like, put her best beads on his little neck so's someone would find him—"

Sanzo stood up, and cut her off with a hand on her throat. "No one," he said, in a quiet, vicious voice, "is asking. Or even gives a fuck. What we want to know, Betty Lou," ("Jenny Sue!" she gasped) "is where the fuck my credit card is. So we can do this the easy way, and you can tell us, or I can blow off your head and Momma's and we can turn this shack upside down until we find it."

The gun came out.

"So choose," he was almost whispering now, "the easy way," the safety came off with a ringing sound, "or the hard way."

"Gee, Mister, you sure have a temper! Not like that other important monk, he had no temper on him at all! Always smiling. Until he told Momma that she had to send their baby down the river, 'course. Guess he couldn't have the other important monks knowing he'd got a child out here or anything. So made Momma put that little baby in the river! Never knew someone could ask for something so cold-hearted. But I s'pose that's the way with you monks, all cold. Just a baby, too! Momma said the people who found him would make fun of him, callin' him River Floater. If we'd kept 'im we was gonna name him Hank. Or Lyle."

Gojyo snorted.

When Sanzo was trying to stab his eyes with a glare, Jenny Sue made a lunge for the gun. He aborted the attempt by grabbing her hand and bending it back. She gasped in pain.

"Where. Is. The. Card."

She looked stupidly into Sanzo's death glare and said, "Hey, my hand's bigger'n yours!"

Gojyo intervened. "Miss, I'm sorry. Don't mind him. We just need to know where the card is. So if you just tell us, we can buy you and Momma dresses, and we can just leave you alone. So why don't you just tell us?"

Jenny Sue rubbed her throat. "It's like this. I took the card—I ain't denying I took the card—but I can't give it back. See, the monk, Momma's monk, he was always talkin' about some Three Aspects. Now me and Momma, we ain't never heard of any Three Aspects, or any Aspects at all. Usually we just say 'I 'spect' or 'you 'spect' and it's all the same. Anyway. I saw that this card was in the name of the Three Aspects, and I need to know who in tarnation the Three Aspects are. And maybe it'll put Momma back in her right head. I already tried havin' the mule kick her, see. So this is the only thing'll work now."

Gojyo nodded. "Well, I'm sure Sanzo here can tell you anything you need to know about them."

Sanzo wasn't looking at either of them. He was staring at the ground, elbows on his knees, taking long draws on another cigarette.

"He sure does smoke an awful lot! Momma's monk did, too. He and Momma would smoke all the time."

Sanzo slammed the cigarette out on the bureau. There was a furious blush on his cheekbones.

Gojyo raised his eyebrows, then turned back to Jenny Sue. "Well. That's just him. What do you need to know?"

"Well, when the monk came by, he said he didn't know why he came. I was real little, and my daddy'd left, so's it was just me and Momma. The monk helped us out for a while but he'd always say he had no idea why the Three Aspects made him come. And then, when Momma was pregnant, he started sayin' how the Three Aspects were gonna make him get rid of that little baby. When he was born, the little baby, the monk said that the Three Aspects were tellin' him to send it down the river. Momma and I'd always thought it was on account of he couldn't have the other monks knowing he'd been sleeping around, like, but if Momma could talk to the Three Aspects about it, she'd be more comfortable."

Sanzo stood up again. "There are no Three Aspects. The card's fake. But we need it back."

Jenny Sue glowered. "They are too real! Koumyu the monk was always talkin' about them and he was real smart!"

Sanzo's body stiffened from the ground up, as if ice had seeped into him from the floor. Then he opened the drawer on the bureau and sifted through some old photos—a man in white robes like his own, with a smile and a long braid, holding the hand of a small blonde woman in pigtails—and removed the credit card. "Idiot," he scoffed at Jenny Sue, and stalked out of the room with the card.

Gojyo shrugged. "Well, that's that. Don't steal, Jenny Sue," and he left to follow Sanzo.

Sanzo flicked the card at Hakkai, who looked at it in surprise, and stalked straight out to the Jeep. Gojyo shrugged 'I don't know' at Hakkai, who held the card out of Goku's reach and followed Sanzo out to the porch.

Sanzo was sitting in the Jeep, yelling, "So help me, Kanzeon, if I have to stab myself in the chest I will. Get the fuck down here right fucking now," nothing happened, until he yelled, "KANZEON BUSATSU! NOW!"

She appeared in the driver's seat, buffing her nails. "You bellowed?"

Sanzo got out of the Jeep and stared into the headlights.

"Hakuryuu," he said, "roll over."

----

"My," said Hakkai later, when they were sitting down at the town's bar. Sanzo was studiously taking shots of Jagermeister, though his fine motor skills had been reduced to the single intuitive motion of flicking the contents of a shot glass down his throat, and he was nearly blind. Gojyo was happily losing at cards, and Goku was upstairs asleep.

"Yeah," Gojyo said.

("Fucking _Hank_" Sanzo slurred to himself)

"It's a good thing Jeep has a roll bar, you know," Hakkai mused.


End file.
